In research, it’s found that people (at least in the US) spend 3x more time on blogs and social media than on emails. It means you can better engage them on social media or with blogs.
Social media has different marketing strategies that businesses use, but to engage the user on blogs, you need SEO (search engine optimization) for your business.
SEO is the process of ranking your website on search engines; you target the right customers with the right blog strategy and get tons of free traffic.
In short, SEO can be the best practice to bring the right customer to your business.
It’s not the only reason SEO is important for any business. There are many other reasons why any business should use search engine optimization (SEO) in its marketing strategy.
Here are 11 incredible benefits of using SEO for small businesses.
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It’s a huge business market.
Before we get into what you will get with SEO for your business, let’s see how big the market is.
There are over 4.3 billion people who use Google. That’s over 92% of the total internet users.
People now even search for local businesses on Google. That’s why near me searches have massively increased.
Secondly, people find e-commerce stores on Google too.
That means people who actually need to know about your products and services are available on Google.
They are questioning many topics relevant to your business, and you are free to target them. Sometimes you can do it yourself; it’s totally free. Sometimes, you need SEO experts to do it for you.
Would you mind missing that organic traffic to your website?
Seriously?
Your business must focus on this huge market because almost every user uses the internet.
Basically, there are two methods to get a share of this market.
- Investing in ads
- Investing in SEO to get organic traffic
Investing in ads means you will get traffic until you are putting money into the process. On the other hand, SEO is different.
SEO is a long-term strategy. You invest today; you enjoy the fruits for the rest of your life.
Once you have attained a position on Google page #1, it won’t disappear instantly. Even if you are not working on SEO anymore, your website might keep getting a portion for years.
Thus if your business is not focusing on SEO and you have long-term plans for your business, you are missing the world’s largest market.
Makes sense?
If you can’t afford it, then at least you should start with free local business online marketing.
Let’s move forward to other real benefits of SEO for businesses.
SEO brings free traffic
SEO (search engine optimization) means optimizing your webpage so that you can appear on Google and get free traffic.
Let me break it down to make it more digestible.
Here is how SEO works.
Whenever someone needs help, they search on Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc. All those search engines guide them on the matter.
Those search engines don’t own any data, but they fetch it from billions of available websites.
You compete with those billions of web pages to make your website appear in the search results. The process by which you compete with all those web pages is called SEO.
Once you optimize your pages, you keep getting free organic traffic from search engines.
The optimization process will surely cost you money, but once it’s done, the traffic is always free. Secondly, SEO is a cost-effective method, and the results are massive over time.
The question that might arise in your mind is how much traffic you can acquire with SEO.
Search engines don’t limit or distribute traffic.
No matter how many pages you optimize, you will get traffic on all those pages. Hence you can get as much traffic as you focus on SEO.
Target the right user
If you have ever run ads on social media, you might already know how hard it is to get the right user.
You show ads to the maximum number of people in your budget, and then you build an ideal user profile to get an idea of your user and target them.
SEO is different and easy. SEO is totally an inbound marketing strategy.
SEO only focuses on those who are already interested in your product or services.
For instance, you have a car dealership business. You can target those looking for local car dealers, exploring new car models, or researching the prices.
You can target with the search queries they are entering. Those search queries are called keywords, which play a vital role in SEO.
If you have the right keywords, you will get the right traffic.
The great thing is that collecting keywords isn’t hard. Many times it’s totally free.
Many tools provide the best keywords and their search volume. Ads Planner is a free tool to get the keywords.
Once you have the best keywords for your business, you can easily target them with white hat (techniques allowed by Google) SEO.
Brand awareness
Brand awareness is among the top priorities for any business.
You can easily attain all your business goals with SEO, and it won’t cost you as much money as you spend on ads.
Once you focus on SEO, you target many keywords on a single page so that you can appear for maximum results.
Once you can build the website’s authority (with on-page and off-page SEO), your website will appear for all the search queries you target.
As you provide solutions to the maximum of the user problems, it will automatically improve your brand awareness, and hence you build user trust.
Business gains trust with SEO
If you have long-term plans for your business, it’s even essential to focus on SEO for brand awareness.
Once someone finds your ad on social media, and it was not the right time to engage with your product/service, he will surely search for you on search engines some other day.
You will lose user trust if you don’t appear on top search engines.
The reason is that people usually don’t believe in those businesses that don’t have a good appearance on search engines. They believe that top search engine recommendations are the best ones.
Thus, you gain user trust automatically by appearing on the best search engines. Here are some other ways to make your business appear on Google.
It improves user experience.
Search engines want to provide the best results. They never want to disappoint a user.
That’s why they keep prioritizing websites with the best user experience by updating their algorithm. Search engines, especially Google, keep discussing their algorithm updates. They actually want you to improve and satisfy the user.
It means you also have the best information about the ideal user experience. You can follow the guidelines to make your pages not only compatible with search engines but also best for users.
For instance, it’s been old-fashioned that websites were overdesigned, hard to navigate and take too much time to load.
Time changed, and people now love fast, clean, easy-to-navigate websites.
Thus all these became the ranking factors in SEO.
It means if your business focuses on SEO, you are automatically focusing on the best user experience.
It’s more affordable than running ads.
Businesses spend a lot of money on ads. Ads yield quickly, and that’s why it doesn’t remain a burden on the business.
But in SEO, you don’t get results right away.
You find keywords, create optimized content on the keywords, publish the pieces, build some authority, wait for a while, and then it starts yielding.
The process takes time.
That’s why a business can be afraid of spending money today and expecting results after months and sometimes years.
But it’s not risky at all.
Actually, it’s even more rewarding and affordable than running ads.
Research reveals that if you invest in SEO, you will surely get (on average) 2.75 times ROI.
But I believe you get more than your investments in the long run. It’s all about long-term strategy.
For instance, if you target a webpage for a keyword, you could rank for it. Even after you leave working on the webpage, it will stay on the first page for years and will keep sending traffic to your website.
Here is an example to make you understand.
You have targeted a webpage for the keyword, men’s clothes, or any other low-competition keyword. You are now on the first page of Google.
Over a while, if you keep updating the page, you will get traffic on your website for life.
Indeed, SEO is not a completely one-time process. But in SEO, as you keep working on new pages, your older pages (due to internal linking) also build trust and get traffic.
So overall, it becomes affordable for any business.
It’s trackable
As I have mentioned earlier, if you invest in SEO, you wait for at least a month to get results. It’s not as quick as running search engines or social media ads.
But it doesn’t mean you invest in SEO blindly.
You have a complete record of your business website’s performance on search engines.
For instance, if you want to track your web pages on Google, you can create a free account on Google Search Console and track all of your rankings.
You will see whether your rankings are improving or not.
If your ranking for a keyword is 50 this month, the next month should be lower than that. Your target is to secure position 1.
You are tracking everything in your google search console (GSC) account. In your GSC account, you are getting real-time data, how it appears, and how people deal with your web pages. The data will be 100% accurate.
Keep in mind that ranking on position 1 takes time, but you can come to the first page within three months. You can also rank on the first page within a month or a few weeks for low-completion keywords.
I have experience with dozens of keywords; if you focus on untapped keywords for a business and create the best content, you can rank on the first page within a week.
It totally depends on the competition. If it’s a highly competitive keyword with high search volume, it can take years to secure position 1.
SEO helps businesses make better decisions
When you are in SEO, sooner you realize that instead of digging a new hole and filling it, you should fill the empty spaces earlier.
Let me share my story briefly to make you understand.
When I started my early blogs, I was not aware of SEO. I had no idea about the power of keywords and search queries.
I used to share my thoughts without knowing if someone was interested in reading them.
Sooner I realized that people weren’t interested in reading my personal blogs or thoughts. They have their problems, and it’s better to help them solve their problems.
It led me to keyword research. I went to find low-competition keywords and started writing on those topics, and it worked.
The motive to share the story was that when you are in SEO, you sooner realize that it’s much better to share what people are looking for.
You can easily find their queries in SEO in the early step of keyword research.
Once you have massive data of keywords, you understand the search intent; you realize what people are actually expecting from your business and how you can improve it.
This is the same method business analysts use to improve marketing.
Businesses can reach the buyer early with SEO
If you are in business, you might already know the buying cycle. It’s a process in which a user completes the buying journey.
Buying journeys ain’t simple anymore.
As people used to ask their friends in the early days, now people ask Google for help.
For instance, if someone wants to buy a business laptop, he will first see which laptop will be suitable for his business. He will search for a buying guide that could help him buy the best laptop for a business.
If you are selling laptops, you can catch the user by offering buying guides for different businesses.
The same is for every business.
Whatever business you run, you can catch the users by sharing different research topics.
For instance, if you sell domains, you can share key points to choose the best domains. Lastly, you can ask them to buy from your business.
The other best example is that as you are reading why SEO is important for business, you are in the early stage of SEO. Being an SEO expert, I can offer you the best SEO services for your business.
SEO helps businesses bypass the competition
Competition is everywhere.
Even if you run ads, you must fully optimize your ad to compete with your competitors.
But SEO gives you a chance actually to bypass the competition.
Here is how.
Google has revealed that they are getting almost 15% new searches every day. That means at least 15% of search queries are not answered or discussed yet.
If you could pick the best among those untapped queries, you could be the only business to satisfy the user. Sometimes you can find a few money keywords, hire SEO writers to write optimized content, or do it yourself by adding LSI keywords. You will actually sell your products or services without any competition.
Otherwise, it’s yielding in brand awareness.
So overall, SEO is the best cost-effective way for branding and get leads and sales with a long-term strategy.
Is SEO worth it for small businesses?
SEO has a very decent ROI for any business. Secondly, it’s a huge market for long-term businesses. So overall, SEO is worth it for small businesses.
Does every business need SEO?
SEO is a long-term strategy. All those businesses who have plans to run businesses for years need SEO. The reason is that it’s cost-effective and has a better ROI.
How does SEO improve your business?
SEO keeps changing over time. So when businesses are in SEO, they are aware of the best trends and the things that matter the most in business.
So, along with organic traffic SEO data is useful to improve the user experience and keep moving forward along with the world.
Can I do SEO on my own?
SEO is teamwork. It’s not one man’s job. So the best is to leverage SEO services with an in-house team or outsource it.